Citadel and Kenneth C. Griffin

Citadel Investment Group, LLC was founded in 1990 and is known as just Citadel. It has control over two different functions: Citadel which is an asset manager, one of the largest in the world with over $26 billion in various assets, and Citadel Securities which trades products, such as equities, to create a market with various interests for institutional and retail related clients. Out of all the hedge funds Citadel Investment Group, LLC is part of a select group that has existed for over twenty years. Only 3% of all hedge funds make up this group. The company is well known for managing some of the largest investors in the world. They specialize in pensions, university endowments, and wealth funds with are sovereign. Citadel is currently based out of Chicago, Illinois but has several corporate locations through out the United States, Europe, and Asia.

It is hard to believe that such a large company was created out of a Harvard University dorm room and just 265 thousand dollars. It took three years of hard work before Citadel Investment Group, LLC was ready to be launched with the additional help from numerous supporters. It began with about $4.6 million as its capital and only increased from there. Its first flagship fund was called Wellington, which is the name the company kept for under a year. Within eight years the company had mad over $2 billion in monetary and other assets. In 1998 the corporation was able to save itself from a collapse which affected long-term capital by requiring its investors to restrict or limit their ability to remove their funds and assets once they relinquished them. In 2012 Forbes 400 identified the companies as one of the highest earning investment groups in the world. In March 2015 Citadel was rated one of the Top 10 Great Workplaces in the financial field by the Great Places to Work Institute.

According to wallstreetjournal.com, the founder of Citadel Investment Group, LLC was Kenneth C. Griffin. He was born in Daytona Beach, Florida on October 15, 1968. He went to Harvard and is the CEO and founder of Citadel. With the help of a good friend and his family the corporation grew to have over 100 employees. On June 2002 CFO Magazine included Griffin on its list of influential people who had an impact in the financial world. He has been featured in the Forbes 400 numerous times for his role as Citadel Investment Group’s CEO. Kenneth C. Griffin’s first appearance in the magazine was over a decade ago in 2003, when he was worth about $650 million. This was also when he celebrated being the youngest person to ever make the list via a self-made company. A year later Griffin was ranked the eighth richest under 40, who started their own company and was also from North America. He and his company was growing almost one billion dollars a year. In 2015 Kenneth C. Griffin attended the Milken Institute Global Conference where he gave a presentation about his company and his plans for the future.